#21 The Human Relations Area Files, not so ‘fuddy-duddy’ after all: [Part 2]
Jonathan Turner defends Spencer’s prolific and revolutionary science
In First Principles (1862), Herbert Spencer outlined a series of principles about evolution of the universe, in which there is an “aggregation of matter” in solar systems, in biotic and organismic systems, in psychological systems, in superorganisms composed of relations among organisms, and in ethical systems … The imagery that Spencer sought to communicate is that evolution is a process that is driven by energy, but the nature of the energy varies depending on the domain of the universe that is evolving.
In reading Herbert Spencer, one can sense Spencer’s excitement in perceiving that all realms of the universe could be explained, ultimately, by one law of evolution and a series of corollaries spelled out in First Principles. While he had published The Principles of Psychology (1855) in book form prior to this more general statement, he clearly wanted to emphasize that ethics and psychology are domains of the entire universe to be explained by a general law of evolution. These principles of evolution enumerated in First Principles are, of course, so general and imprecise as to be more metaphoric than explanatory. They nonetheless lay out the essential topic of evolutionary analysis when applied to sociological phenomena: the movement of societies from simple, segmented or “homogeneous” forms of social structure and culture toward more differentiated or “heterogeneous” forms. This basic idea undergirds much sociology.
Compared to early European sociologists, virtually all the early founders of American sociology adopted Spencer’s vision of evolution, and today the essential theoretical argument persists in a variety of literature, including the analysis of organizations as they grow and differentiate, communities as they differentiate into sectors and neighbourhoods, and macro-level theories of societal evolution. Whether or not the dynamics of differentiation occur in societies and their subunits, such as organizations and communities, they represent a manifestation of Spencer’s general principles about growth, differentiation and integration of the matter constituting superorganisms, or systems organizing organic bodies.
Societies and their constituent subunits were viewed by Spencer as superorganisms. They are built from the motion of energy inhering in behaviours causing the aggregation of organic bodies and, then, their differentiation and integration into social systems. Sociology was thus the science of superorganisms, from human societies at one end of the continuum to colonies of insects at the other end, and all patterns in the organization of organic bodies between these two extremes.
The Principles of Sociology was published in serial form from 1874 to 1896, but the volumes that constitute the core of that work were preceded in 1873 by another, much shorter, volume with the title The Study of Sociology. This earlier book is an epistemological statement about the nature of theory as an explanatory tool of science. For Spencer, the subject matter of sociology is inherent in people thinking about their social world, and as the social world changes in dramatic ways, as with industrialization and urbanization, this thought become systematic and eventually scientific. This book lays out the epistemology of science, in general, as seeking explanatory principles, and the goals of social science, in particular, as a similar search for the laws or principles of human social organization. The main body of the book, however, is a review of the sources of potential bias in humans studying their own creations — societies — and the ways of overcoming these biases to make sociology a more value-neutral and objective science. Compared to, for example, Durkheim’s The Rules of the Sociological Method ([1895]1996) or Weber’s [Economy and Society 1922] (1968) review of the problems facing a science of sociology, Spencer’s treatment is not only more detailed, but also more sophisticated and worthy of serious attention today in debates over the prospects for a science of society.
The Principles of Sociology is a long work because it is filled with data gathered from ethnographic accounts from preliterate populations through histories of literate societies to contemporary societies of Spencer’s time. These data are used to buttress abstract theoretical principles articulated by Spencer in The Principles of Sociology, one of the most important sociological treatises ever written. The theoretical principles come from Spencer’s genius for abstract thinking, whereas the data come from the project initiated before The Study of Sociology (1873). This project was termed Descriptive Sociology, and in it Spencer employed academics to assemble data on diverse types of societies at various stages of societal evolution in terms of a classification system he had developed. Thus, professional scholars were cataloguing data for Spencer during the last thirty years of his life, and they continued to do so for several decades after his death (from monies left to the project in his will).
So, while Spencer was an “armchair” theorist in one sense, he put together in the sixteen volumes of Descriptive Sociology an enormous amount of data or, in his view, “facts” about societies.
A more methodological legacy from Spencer has also been lost in the twentieth century. This is the legacy of Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology. Like so much of Spencer’s work, the inspiration for what eventually became known as the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) has been lost. As a young graduate student working with Keller at Yale in 1925, George P. Murdock clearly had learned about Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology from his mentors at Yale, and he may even have helped fill The Science of Society with data from Descriptive Sociology and elsewhere. Murdock understood the logic of Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology: record data on societies, especially rapidly vanishing preliterate societies, in terms of a common set of categories, which in turn would allow for comparative analysis across types of societies and the use of more statistical analysis of data as “variables”. In the late 1920s, then, Murdock began to develop the idea for the HRAF, which would allow for statistical comparisons among societies with respect to fundamental properties of their organization. The early publications on the basic ideas for the files began to come out in the 1930s. The Institute of Human Relations had sponsored the HRAF’s predecessor, Murdock’s cross-cultural Survey, and eventually the HRAF was incorporated. By 1949, a consortium of universities committed to expanding the files on a continuous basis.
Spencer’s legacy lives on in HRAF and, currently, it is his most widely used contribution to social science, even if virtually all social sciences have no clue of their ultimate origins in Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology.
Probably more than any other theorist of the 19th Century, Spencer documented his arguments with data that he had professional colleagues assemble in the massive volumes of his Descriptive Sociology … Thus, his laying out of the stages of societal evolution is not a theoretical exercise but, instead, an empirical one.
Jonathan H. Turner, ‘Chapter 4 Herbert Spencer’s Sociological Legacy’, in Herbert Spencer Legacies, edited by Mark Francis and Michael W. Taylor, Routledge 2015 [pp. 61-63, 67-8]
Jonathan H. Turner and Richard S. Machalek, The New Evolutionary Sociology: Recent and Revitalized Theoretical and Methodological Approaches, Routledge 2018 [pp. 40-41]